On 9 April 2012, the lives of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were about to change forever.

That day is the date Facebook acquired their little company, Instagram, for $1 billion in cash and stock.

Back then, Instagram was an increasingly popular social network among teenagers and young adults, but few imagined what it would end up becoming a few years later.

Nowadays, with a value of over $100 billion, Instagram has become one of the most popular social media channels not only for millennials but for businesses as well: more than 25 million worldwide businesses currently have a professional profile, and more than 2 million advertisers use it to generate more traffic and sales.

We can testify to the power of Instagram marketing: with more than 1.4 million followers, Instagram has allowed us to attract hundreds of thousands of site visitors, launch multiple courses and get thousands of new subscribers on our email list. All thanks to one app, one social media channel, and a few posts a day.

If you want to take advantage of Instagram’s power to build an audience, drive large volumes of traffic to your site, and generate more qualified sales, this guide is for you.

Creating Engaging Instagram Content

If you asked us what’s the secret behind our success in Instagram, there’s one answer:

1. Focus on your audience and their desires.

All marketing professionals live and breath the same mantra: understand your audience.

Read any article about marketing strategy, and you will see it starts with customer or market research, persona development, and other tactics that focus on getting to know the audience.

This is no exception with Instagram.

If you want to have a popular account, you need to create content that speaks to their hearts.

The best way to know your audience is by first checking the existing demographic statistics done on Instagram’s users. According to data taken from Statista, the great majority of users belong in the 18 to 44 age range, with 68% of users being females.

Such data isn’t surprising, because Instagram has always been known as a youth-focused social network, in contrast with the more professional LinkedIn or the more heterogeneous Facebook.

Also, it’s interesting to note 80% of Instagram users come from outside the U.S.

If your store gets large volumes of traffic from Instagram but you get few conversions, the fact they can’t get your products shipped may explain it.

At the end of the day, marketing on Instagram works like any other channel. Start by having a deep understanding of your audience first and the rest will follow.

2. Review your competitors’ top content.

An easy way to find what kind of content rings closest to your audience is by analyzing your competitors’ content.

We’re not suggesting you need to copy their posts, style, or ideas.

Rather, you want to find what works best for them and look for patterns that guide you to potential elements to add to your posts.

Let’s say you were in the online mattress industry. We’d need to start analyzing our top competitors:

With this simple analysis, we have found that all of our large competitors don’t publish often — which is great for us as publishing consistently matters — they all use professional photos and videos, and they all mix promotional and engaging content.

The competitor analysis you carry out will show you what’s the minimum level of content quality you need to publish.

Your Instagram Profile Page

It’s the place where you explain, in just a few sentences, what your brand is all about.

The way you structure your profile page will have an impact on the way people will find about what you do, who you are, and what you have to offer.

While you don’t have large editing capabilities — you can only edit the logo, the bio, and the URL — the way you put these three elements in place can have a large impact on how your followers will perceive your brand and how much traffic you can attract.

1. Create a compelling bio.

Have you ever been in a networking event, when someone handed you out a business card? What did you see in it?

The name of the person, their position, their contact information, and maybe some words describing what they do or who they are.

Your bio works the same way.

It is the summary of your brand’s identity.

The fact that you don’t have more than 150 characters to use makes it more powerful.

As the old Proverb goes,

“A wise man will be of few words.”

The less you say, and the better you structure that, the more powerful your message will be.

Take a look at our profile:

24 words. 145 characters. Not a lot of space to explain who we really are, is it?

Indeed, we can’t explain a lot in there. But instead of using that as a limitation, we take that as a way to go straight to the core of our mission: helping entrepreneurs build a business.

Imagine for a second you ran Andie’s Swim, a women’s swimsuit company. If you take a look at their about page, you can see they talk a lot about swimsuits that fit, the vulnerable experience women have in swimsuits, and they are a female lead company.

With this information, our bio could say:

Luxury swimwear made for women by women to create a more enjoyable swimsuit buying process that is easy with free shipping and free returns.

Not a bad start and we’re only at 140 characters long.

Take a look at what Andie Swim actually wrote in their bio:

We hit the mark pretty close.

2. Add a keyword that is highly searched and matches your brand.

Keywords are well-known among SEO professionals but are rarely mentioned in the social media world.

It turns out, adding a keyword or two to your profile can help people find you when they search on Instagram.

Surprisingly, you are taken to a page full of user-generated content. Once you click on one of the images there, you can buy the product shown in it.

Another interesting and highly engaging way to increase sales.

When adding a URL, it’s best to use a short link — like the ones you can create with Bitly — that redirects to a special URL which you can then use to track the number of visitors you get from that link and their behavior on your site.

We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

6 Types of Engaging Content to Publish

Publishing engaging content is the heart of a successful Instagram marketing strategy. Your followers want content that interests them; content that plays to their needs and desires.

What kind of content should an ecommerce store owner then publish? Here are seven ideas you can use.

1. People images.

The main challenge between an online store and their brick-and-mortar counterpart is that in the former people can’t touch or try a product.

Your visitors may love your products, but they need to know how they look and feel like in real life.

Showing people using, trying, and enjoying your products is a way to solve such a problem.

Better yet, it shows the brand is human and relatable; it shows people actually like and use their products.

All the successful ecommerce sites we analyzed throughout this guide feature people — whether customers or models — using their products for that same reason.

SkullCandy is one of the most unique companies thanks to its eccentric branding.

In almost every post, you can see the experience they are creating through their photography, video promos, and even snippets from interviews with artist like Topaz Jones.

The Honest Company also shares plenty of pictures of babies and their mothers, their main customer audience. Not only this is good to showcase their products, but it also helps to hit hard on their brand.

2. Behind the scenes.

We could talk about all the reasons why people like following brands on Instagram.

But if we had to choose the main reason, it’s authenticity.

No one ever stops to read (or even enjoy) a billboard. Yet they do so on Instagram.

We can discuss Instagram’s posts aren’t ads per se, but still, they are branded communications.

From all the ways to convey such authenticity, posts that show “behind the scenes” situations feel the most real.

In such a post, a brand isn’t behaving like one but showing the “rough edges” of their company.

In this example, you can see Paper Source, a premium paperie online retailer, showing their latest designs.

While there’s nothing particularly exceptional about this post, if you compare it with the rest of their feed, it looks like a photo a person would have taken and not a brand, which makes it unique and different.

DJI, the largest drone manufacturing company, uses Instagram to share the fantastic shots their drones film. Most of their posts are videos for the obvious reason DJI specializes in video-filming products.

5. Lifestyle product photos.

So far, we’ve talked about posting with the aim of engaging your followers.

But what about your products? Can’t you post about them?

You definitely can (and should!).

We just wanted you to think about Instagram as more than a marketing channel where you promote your products and more as a way to connect with your followers.

Now, when it comes to posting your products, you should still strive to connect them in a light and non-commercial way.

The best way to do so is by focusing on what’s called “lifestyle images.”

Lifestyle photos don’t focus on your products so much as a way to represent the ideal life your followers could have with your products.

Revgear does a great job of capturing some great fighting lifestyle photography. Take a look at their feed. All the pictures and videos in there represent the way you can use their gear in your training and MMA fights.

Another company that does a fantastic job using lifestyle photos is the Swedish clothing retailer H&M.

Instead of showing their product photos as they do in their store, they show their products in a fashionable way.

6. Leverage user-generated content.

You can spend a lot of money taking the perfect product photo, like you saw in the examples above, but they will still look like an advertisement.

When an Instagram user is scrolling through their feed, they see their friend’s photos, and they all look natural yet imperfect: the lighting isn’t good, the angle of the photo isn’t correct, and so much more make the product look very real.

Leveraging user-generated product photos allows you to show your customers using your products, and at the same time, showing them in a personal way.

ASOS, the British fashion retailer, is well-known for featuring a user-generated photo every few photos they publish.

Interestingly enough, they also show the number code for the product used in every picture, making it easier for their followers to find their products.

They represent the ability any social media user has to find a topic, an idea, or a “shared belief” at any given time.

When people search for a hashtag, they don’t want to find a product (like one of yours); they want to find a solution, a painkiller. Or maybe they just want to find something that entertains them, like a cute cat video.

When you use a hashtag, you aren’t optimizing your post like you do when you change the title tag of one of your product pages.

You are trying to connect your post with that same shared feeling people have around that hashtag.

Finding hashtags goes beyond adding the fifty most popular ones and call it a day.

Using popular hashtags like #instagood, #instacool, and #followme, and you will only attract spammy accounts that will add no value to your posts beyond asking for a “followback.”

You need to find the hashtags that work best for your brand and your given post.

The right hashtags will help you reach new accounts and get more people to interact with your content.

When used correctly, hashtags can help you get more likes, comments, and followers.

Finding the right hashtags:

A simple way to find hashtags is to use the search bar.

Pick a few words that are connected with your account and see what results you get.

For example, for our account, we could use “entrepreneur” and “startup.”

As you can see, there are a lot of results with high volume of posts.

While you want to consider using all of the hashtags that seem relevant to your posts, you also want to make sure you are attracting the best crowd.

Some of these hashtags may not be that good, so double check each hashtag before you use it.

For example, after clicking on #entrepreneurial, I found most of the posts are similar to the ones we publish in our account.

On the other hand, I checked #creativeentrepreneur, which has almost 800k posts, and I found the posts in there aren’t any good.

Repeat the process for every hashtag you consider using.

To speed the hashtag search process, you can use a tool like Hashtagify.

This tool will give you not only what hashtags are popular, but also the weekly and monthly trends, the top influencers that use it, and much more.

For example, after I search for #entrepreneurial, one of the hashtags we found in our search process before, here’s the analysis I got:

Such analysis provides much more in-depth data that you can use to find more relevant hashtags.

Consider picking hashtags beyond their high volume.

While #entrepreneur has 33 million posts, it’s hardly anyone will ever find your post in such a jungle of results.

If, on the other hand, you use #entrepreneurgoals, the chances of getting seen are much higher.

What’s more, the latter hashtag seems much more focused than the former.

When picking a hashtag, go for relevancy, not volume.

You want your hashtags to represent your posts and your brand.

After you finish the research process, you should have a list with all the hashtags you will use.

The list will grow over time as you find new hashtags.

Some may stop being popular, while new ones will appear.

If you want to take this process even further, you can consider testing using more (or less) hashtags than you usually use and see what results you get.

With the help of your Instagram Insights, or a separate tool like Iconosquare, you can see if using a specific set of hashtags lead to an increase in your reach and engagement rate.

How to use your hashtags:

When it comes to using hashtags, there are two schools of thought.

One says you should add them right in your post, as you can see below:

If you currently have a few thousand followers and your posts get low levels of engagement (i.e., few comments and likes in relation with your follower number), does it really make sense you create a branded hashtag? Probably not.

If you are already observing positive results from your Instagram marketing, however, you want to consider creating one.

The best way to consider creating a branded hashtag is to think what you are promoting and what you want to achieve from that promotion.

BarkBox, a company that sells subscription boxes for dogs, created #BarkBox and #BarkBoxDay.

These hashtags aren’t creative, but they fit perfectly what they promote: their boxes.

Since people (and their dogs) wait for the boxes to arrive, the idea of creating a “Bark Box Day” makes sense.

That hashtag has generated almost 10k posts, most of them being from customers and fans of the brand.

2. Shoutouts (S4S).

Reciprocation is one of human’s most basic social instincts.

We simply feel an urging need to give back what other people give to us.

Does someone like your shoes? You tell them you like their hair.

Does someone say they like your writing? You tell them you like their hair.

Well, you may not be the most original person complimenting others, but at least you know how to respect social norm.

The nature of Shoutouts works based on the idea of reciprocation.

An account gives you a “shoutout” — that is, they talk to their followers about your company positively —, and you return their shoutout in your account.

Win-win, that’s all there is to it.

When you get a shoutout, you get exposure to a new audience that’s (preferably) connected to yours, and you repeat the favor to the other account.

With the help of shoutouts, you can quickly scale your following volume without almost fuss.

The simplicity on which shoutouts work is what makes them so powerful.

While the value given isn’t as high, and therefore the engagement you will receive from the audience, it’s still highly effective.

The process of carrying out a shoutout is straightforward:

Find accounts that share the same type of content as you do

Find accounts that have the same level of followers as you do

Approach the accounts and ask for S4S (Shoutout for Shoutout)

Types of Instagram shoutouts:

We can categorize Instagram shoutouts in two groups:

Like for like shoutout

Follow for follow shoutout

Both campaigns work similarly, in the former you exchange liking a specific post, and in the other you follow someone else’s account.

It’s much easier to get a “like for like” shoutout exchange as the task on itself is rather small.

Anyone can like a post without much effort.

Following an account involves slightly more effort, and thus can be harder to pull off, but it’s more effective as it helps you build a following base.

What truly matters isn’t the like or follow per se, but the account which does so.

Remember, you want to attract a new audience that’s related to yours, so the account which you exchange the favor with must be relevant.

Free vs paid:

If you are going to do a shoutout with an account with a small audience, then it’s likely they won’t ask for anything in return.

The value they get is the same as the one you get: increased exposure.

When asking for a shoutout with a social media influencer which has a large number of followers, then it’s likely they will do it as a paid service.

The cost will vary upon the size of the following base.

Obviously, the larger the audience, the more it will cost you.

How to find shoutout groups:

While you can start a shoutout campaign manually, searching for accounts you like and messaging them accordingly, there are a number of sites which allow you to carry out this process from their platform, including the account information, the messaging, and the payment.

You can also try Fiverr, although by the look of the results, it’s hard to tell the quality and size of the accounts.

As it always happens with any marketing activity you carry out, keep a close eye to your shoutout campaigns.

If you are going to invest some of your hard-earned money on this, make sure you are actually seeing an increase in your engagement levels and following base. Scale your investment as you see the return back.

How to Funnel New Followers to your Store to Increase Sales

Once you start putting the time to take high-quality photos and engaging with your audience, you will start to increase the follower base.

After you get a few thousand people to follow you on Instagram, you will look at your screen and think, “Is that it? Now what?“

It’s easy to get overly focused on getting Instagram followers and forgetting the ultimate goal of your Instagram account: getting more sales.

A few years ago, the idea of “social commerce” was trending and people had high expectations around it.

It turned out, most social networks have had a hard time generating sales for their users.

Instagram has been one of the few exceptions.

In the past few years, Instagram has been working on a number of features that have allowed businesses to get more customers from their posts.

Here are three ways you can tap into Instagram’s powerful sales boosting capabilities.

1. Instagram Stories.

Brands and their customers have historically communicated in a formal, almost impersonal way.

The former would use billboards or TV ads to explain the latest product launch, spend millions of dollars, and hope to get people to see their messages.

The latter, on the other hand, would see their ads and take them with a pinch of salt. Advertising, after all, is a unilateral: brand sell and customers become sold.

With the release of Instagram Stories (which the company copied from the popular Snapchat “snap” feature), now companies can message their customers as if they were one of their friends.

The fact a story doesn’t look like an ad (or any kind of marketing communication) is what makes it effective.

While your ecommerce store doesn’t face the problems of a Fortune 500 — people actually like buying from a small company with a deep commitment to serve them — you still want to use online advertisement smartly.

As we explained before, people don’t use social networks like Instagram to shop; they do it to connect with other people.

If you go around Instagram pushing your products, most will ignore you.

Instagram stories act as an effective way to talk to your customers — better yet, to connect with them — promote your brand, but keep their trust at the same time.

Does this sound too good to be true? It’s not.

Instagram Stories are simple to use, yet effective.

Here are the most effective ways you can use them for your ecommerce store.

Use scarcity:

Have you ever bought a product because you were told it would stop being available?

The reason why this happens is simple: people feel drawn to buy what’s scarce.

Anthropologists can explain why this happens, but right now, we want to focus on the consequences of such instinctive behavior.

When you position your offers as scarce — whether that’s the time they will be available in stock or a special price in which you are currently selling one of your products — people will feel drawn to act upon them.

In other words, scarcity will make them more likely to purchase.

Postmates, the popular delivery company, has used scarcity in their Instagram stories by giving away $100 to new customers for only 7 days.

Such amount of money for installing their app and signing up seems like a no-brainer, but making the offer scarce gives it less room for passing this offer up and instead of acting on it.

You don’t want to be the guy who missed the offer all your friends talk about, don’t you?

When you use influencers to promote your business for you, you’re basically borrowing part of the authority and trust people have in them to your brand.

An influencer helps you boost your brand’s reach in a natural, non-promotional way.

Even if the influencer uses and explicitly recommends purchasing your products, it doesn’t feel like an ad.

When Birchbox partnered with Lindsay Ellingson, an influencer with 874k followers in the cosmetics industry, they got to promote their products in a friendly and useful way with someone their followers already like and trust.

With an estimated industry value of $1 billion, influencer marketing is and will continue to be a powerful way to promote your products on Instagram.

How to find influencers who want to work with you:

Despite all the hype around influencer marketing, one of the most significant challenges companies face is finding influencers with whom to work.

There are thousands of accounts in almost every industry imaginable that have a large following, yet that doesn’t make them a good target for your influencer marketing campaign.

Before you start working with an influencer, you want to know what you want to get from them.

In our case, we want to increase sales, but if you have another goal, then your strategy will look differently than the one laid out here.

With the goal in mind, develop a one-sheet media kit with an overview of your brand.

The idea is to have a document prepared to send the influencer before you get started working so they get informed around everything they need to know about your brand.

When you start looking for influencers, don’t focus on the like and comment quantities, but on the engagement rate.

A post’s engagement rate represents the combined set of likes and comments per post, divided by the total following number.

To find influencers in your industry, you can start searching for popular hashtags in your industry and looking at the accounts with large number of comments and likes, which are usually at the top of the results.

Make a list of the influencers you find, and after you have at least 10 to 20, create the pitch you will use to contact them.

A good first email which will help you gauge her interest looks like this:

“Hi Maria!

John from My Company here. We love the content you post. It looks aligned with our brand and audience. We’d love to work with you in an upcoming campaign we’re working on.

Would you want to hear more? Send me your email and I will send you more details.

Whatever road you choose, you want to be clear on what you want them to say and do so there are no misunderstandings.

After the influencer makes the post (or number of posts, if that’s what was decided), check your follower growth, engagement rate, and even site traffic.

While the latter is the hardest, if you create a special short URL for the influencer to use, you will be able to track their followers’ behavior.

Micro-influencers vs. celebrities:

It’s common to think influencer marketing is only for famous people like Cristiano Ronaldo, but that’d be wrong.

Having a celebrity feature a product is called an “endorsement,” and it’s an old marketing practice.

While you can use a celebrity to endorse your products, not only do such task would cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars, they relevancy of your offer will not necessarily be ideal.

Think about it this way: it’s better to get a “micro-influencer” (i.e., a celebrity in a niche) to promote your product to 1,000 highly engaged followers than a celebrity with 500,000 uninterested followers.

Some micro-influencers will even partner with you in return for free product, especially if they already love your brand.

A survey Collective Bias carried out on 14,000 US respondents showed 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity because consumers can relate more to these influencers and value their opinions more than that of celebrity influencers.

What’s more, only 3% of the surveyed consumers said to be influenced by celebrity endorsements when making a product purchase decision.

We’re not saying you shouldn’t consider using a celebrity; rather, you should start with micro-influencers, test your offers, audiences, and budget, and find what works best.

The Most Important Instagram Strategy

After reading the previous section on increasing your follower count, you are likely to end up focusing on that metric alone.

That’d be a big mistake for a simple reason: one highly engaged follower is more valuable than hundreds of disengaged ones.

Your ultimate goal is to attract the right audience with whom you communicate.

Most importantly, you want to find a group of people who are more likely to become customers.

The photo is good, but this post has a much higher rate of engagement, with 487 likes, 25 comments, and 9,476 followers, that brings us to a 5.40% engagement rate for this post.

2. Engage with every comment.

Think for a second you are one of your followers. What do you see when you open your Instagram? Hundreds of photos, many of which are from your friends. With so many interesting options, why would you ever stop to comment on a brand’s photo?

In this context, when one of your followers stops to not only look, but comment on one of your photos, it shows commitment.

A comment is more than what it looks; it shows your follower cares enough about you to stop everything and tell you something. Even if that’s a smiley face, the fact they wrote at you matters.

Don’t overlook and underestimate the importance of comment. As a consequence, you want to reciprocate this representation of interest with a like. It’s a small task, but it shows you care as well.

If you want to make it even better, you can comment back at them. On Instagram, you are more than a brand; you are one of your follower’s friend. Act like one.

Now that people have the chance to buy anything they want with just a few clicks, they feel another problem: isolation.

It’s great to make purchases online, but it’s not the same without having the chance to enjoy the products, share them with your friends, and discover what brands are really about.

Instagram has solved that problem by bringing the social element that online stores were missing.

Most importantly, it has transformed companies from mere corporations (legal entities), to human-like beings.

With the help of Instagram marketing, your ecommerce platform can connect with your followers — who also are potential customers — and drive a level of human trust that stores lost when they crossed to the other side of the screen.

To sum up everything we’ve seen:

You need to start with engaging content. If Instagram marketing was a house of cards, engaging content would be the base of it; pull it out of your strategy, and the whole house will fall down.

The best ways to have a highly effective profile to get more followers and increase your traffic.

The 7 types of engaging content that will help you connect with your audience. Whether that’s video, user-generated content, lifestyle photos, or more, you have a wide range of options to use and strike a conversation with your followers.

How consistency, storytelling, and finding the right posting schedule can help you improve your follower attraction and engagement.

The way hashtags and shoutouts can let you access larger pools of followers with little money and great results.

How to drive more sales from your posts with the help of Instagram stories (sorry Snapchat), shoppable images, and influencer marketing, you can forget the whole idea of social media as a “top of the funnel” channel and use it as a “make it rain” channel as well.

Finally, remember the basics: it’s all about them. When you look to create engaging content, the engagement comes from a deep understanding of their interest.

So where do you start?

We can tell you to start by opening an account, but that’d be unnecessary.

If you have read 10% of this guide, you’d have already done so already.

We could tell you to optimize your profile page, create engaging content, and all the other things we’ve explained so far.

But to finish, we just want you to keep you focused on one thing:

Connect.

Lower your interest in getting more followers, traffic, or sales for one second and just connect.

Once a follower clicks with your brand, everything else will follow.

Connect. Click. Cha-ching!

Want more insights like this?

We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Ivan Kreimer is a content writer for Foundr, an online magazine for self-made entrepreneurs who want to learn how to launch and grow their online business. Learn more about how to use Instagram marketing in our free masterclass.